(not so) strange request

tonight during service when the server was taking the dessert order for a table, a diner asked if i could do something without any fruit at all.  she said that fruit is for people who diet.  nothing wrong with a little gluttony.  the funny thing is that over the last 8 years, every dish i have done is based on fruit from the market or local purveyor.  it may not be the main component, but it is buried somewhere on the plate.  that's growing up in the california culinary world.
so i threw this together with mise en place from other dishes and some items i had on hand.

chocolate cremeux, peanut butter powder, chocolate sauce, vanilla bean ice cream, amaretto gelee, Valrhona pearls, popcorn croquant, chocolate tuiles, herbs..

i almost put apricot ice cream on the plate but realised what the task at hand was

i think it needs lemon....damn

purple rain

 blackberry with creme de cassis.  had some blackberry puree that i made sitting around.  so i made a ganache with white chocolate and creme de cassis.  the color is an incredible purple.

i forget sometimes how much blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries "stain" other foods and transfer their color.  need to remember that.

books about UFO's

just got our first copy of the new Relais & Chateaux cookbook.  very excited about it.

my first published dish.  can't believe my name is in the same book as Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, Jean Georges, Joachim Splichal and many others.

i think the book comes out in october, maybe i could get myself a copy. 

broken

i really like this picture.  it is abstract. looks nothing like food.  yet it has shape, movement, texture.  almost takes action. 

it interests me greatly the differences in what people find appealling.  i guess that is the basis of all art. 

what seems good to me is not the same for you.  music, painting, architecture, literature, film...

so many mediums. 

within the food world, a matter of perspective also applies.  i have worked in restuarants where everything must be exact.  i have seen carrots peeled, cut into similar sized rounds, and then punched out with a small round cutter to make perfect coins. amazing to look at when you see a plate with 3 or 4 carrot buttons on a plate that look like they were stamped out of a machine let alone a whole nights mise en place of those same carrot buttons.

on the opposite end of the spectrum, there is something equally beautiful as seeing those same carrots as nature intended them to be.  each one an individual, with its own twists and curves, some fat, some slender, long and short.  there seems to be more going on. 

in pastry, mostly everything is produced by us. we control the shape.  so many molds and forms that sometimes i want to smash the product just to give it another life....a story to tell. 

so i made yuzu meringue, shaped with acetate and dried it in the dehydrator.  once removed from the acetate, they looked like PVC piping.  with a nod to the skateboard days, i smashed them up.

the rest of the dish they accompany is fairly standard.

raspberry cream, vanilla bean panna cotta, raspberries, yuzu meringue, raspberry shaved ice (thanks Pacojet) and some basil

it's summer, i'm trying to take it easy

mignardise

here are the current mignardise.
citrus macaron...yuzu juice, meyer lemon juice, lime zest
cocoa marshmallow

hey!

i don't know if someone at Valrhona is working on this or not but maybe they should jump to it.

or maybe it is the job of the cook to produce this themselves.  i am sure by now that most pastry chefs know about it.  at this point i just make about half a bag of Ivoire just to have on hand so when i feel like using it, it is there.

going to combine it with popcorn and strawberries

drool collection

i have always liked white chocolate-raspberry ice cream.  with little chunks of chocolate mixed in.

so here is my plated version.

raspberry sorbet, white chocolate parfait (aerated), ground white chocolate, rosewater gelee, chocolate mint (thanks brittany), those cool little Valrhona chocolate pearls, chocolate "twigs". 

the dish is finished with a loose raspberry fluid gel (the modern coulis). 

...this is the key to aeration.

i might be wrong

still wanting to keep the flavor profile of chocolate/apricot/bitter almond, i replaced the cake with a chocolate cremeux.  using a technique i did last year, i set a frozen disk of apricot gel in the center of the cremeux.  as the chocolate sets, the gel thaws and becomes a creamy apricot center. 

and then i did something wrong (or right).

i put the cremeux in the microwave for 15 seconds.

i have been watching Heston Blumenthal's In Search of Perfection show lately.  in one episode he was making a baked alaska (next on my list to play with).  Chef Heston wanted to have a frozen exterior with a warm interior...so he threw it in the microwave.  it worked, but he didn't find the result as useful as he intended. 

that was stuck in my head while plating up the cremeux.  what if the center was warm? 

well it worked.  though because it is only a limited amount of filling, the temperature difference is minimal. so maybe i'm wrong in trying it. but you never know what will happen if you don't try things.

the new cremeux/coulant.  will keep on working with it.